Does The Talos Principle 2 use Unreal Engine 5?

The Talos Principle 2 is easily one of the most visually stunning games of 2023 so far. Developer Croteam has always been an artistic bunch, something that is very much reflected in the kind of games the studio creates. The highly underrated previous title in the puzzle-platformer series, The Talos Principle, was a fantastic example of art style over raw visual fidelity.

However, with their latest title, the studio seems to have struck a fine balance between an excellent art style and impressive graphical fidelity. Being exclusive to the current generation of console and PC hardware, The Talos Principle 2 delivers some truly breathtaking visuals.

This is thanks to the game's use of Epic Games' latest iteration of their game engine, the Unreal Engine 5.1. The Talos Principle 2 makes use of both the Lumen and Nanite technologies of Unreal Engine 5 to power its artistic vision of the dystopian future, while also allowing players with higher-end PCs to enable ray tracing for even better graphical presentation.

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The Talos Principle 2 uses Unreal Engine 5 to deliver some truly breathtaking visuals on current-gen consoles and PCs

The Talos Principle 2 is among the very few games released this year that make use of the Unreal Engine 5. Despite that, the game doesn't have particularly high system requirements, akin to other UE5 games like Lords of the Fallen, Remnant 2, or Immortals of Aveum. It requires a GTX 970 or RX 470 as the minimum GPU to simply run it.

However, if you're planning to play the game with all its visual flair enabled, i.e., ray tracing (RT), and have all the settings cranked up to their maximum presets, then you'll require an RTX 3070 or RX 6800, or better. Surprisingly enough, Croteam's latest title is quite well-optimized on PC, which is a very rare occurrence for Unreal Engine 5 games.

Currently, The Talos Principle 2 sits with an "overwhelmingly positive" review on Steam, with players praising the game's art style, visuals, and very impressive optimization. Although there are a few reports of the game suffering from shader compilation stutters in certain areas, those are very rare and likely to be addressed by future updates.

Unreal Engine 5, despite its many promising visual upgrades, is an extremely demanding game engine. Although the engine was built with the current generation console hardware in mind, i.e., PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, there are very few titles that take complete advantage of all its systems while also maintaining an acceptable level of performance.